The Poetry of
Robinson Jeffers
1
Table of Contents
The Poetry of
Robinson
Jeffers
About the Book.................................................... 3
About the Author ................................................. 4
Historical and Literary Context .............................. 7
Other Works/Adaptations ..................................... 8
Discussion Questions............................................ 9
Additional Resources .......................................... 10
Credits .............................................................. 11
“Permanent things,
or things forever
renewed, like the
grass and human
passions, are the
material for
poetry...”
Preface
The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is emotionally direct,
magnificently musical, and philosophically profound. No one
has ever written more powerfully about the natural beauty
of the American West. Determined to write a truthful poetry
purged of ephemeral things, Jeffers cultivated a style at
once lyrical, tough-minded, and timeless.
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2
About the Book
Introduction to Robinson Jeffers
The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is distractingly memorable,
not only for its strong music, but also for the hard edge of
its wisdom. His verse, especially the wild, expansive
narratives that made him famous in the 1920s, does not fit
into the conventional definitions of modern American poetry.
Scarcely stirring from Carmel, California, Jeffers wrote about
ideas: big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss.
The directness and clarity of Jeffers’s style reflects the
priority he put on communicating his worldview.
He challenged scientists on their own territory. Unlike most
writers, he had studied science seriously in college and
graduate school. He accepted the destruction of
anthropocentric values explicit in current biology, geology,
and physics. Jeffers concentrated on articulating the moral,
philosophical, and imaginative implications of those
discoveries. He struggled to answer the questions that
science had been able only to ask: What are man’s
responsibilities in a world not made solely for him? How does
humankind lead a good and meaningful life without a
Providential God?
Standing apart from the world, he passed dispassionate
judgment on his race and civilization, and he found them
wanting. Pointing out some grievous contradictions at the
core of Western industrial society earned Jeffers a reputation
as a bitter misanthrope (he sometimes was) but this verdict
hardly invalidates the essential accuracy of his message. He
saw the pollution of the environment, the destruction of
other species, the squandering of natural resources, the
recurrent urge to war, and the violent squalor of cities as the
inevitable result of a species out of harmony with its own
world.
What saves Jeffers’s poetry from unrelieved bitterness and
nihilism is its joyful awe and indeed religious devotion to the
natural world. Living on the edge of the Pacific, he found
wisdom, strength, and perspective from observing the forces
of nature around him. Magnificent, troubling, idiosyncratic,
and uneven, Jeffers remains the great prophetic voice of
American modernism.
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About the Author
Robinson Jeffers
(1887-1962)
John Robinson Jeffers, the
great poet of the American
West Coast, was born in the
suburbs of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. His father,
William Hamilton Jeffers, was
a professor of Old Testament
Biblical theology and a
Presbyterian minister. A strict
disciplinarian and serious
Robinson Jeffers, 1948 (Photo
intellectual, the elder Jeffers
by Nat Farbman/Time Life
gave his son rigorous private
Pictures/Getty Images)
lessons in Greek, Latin, and
religion. By the time he was
twelve, Jeffers was also fluent in French and German
(learned during his schooling in Switzerland), but awkward
among other children. Not surprisingly, the boy developed
complex feelings toward his deeply loving but authoritarian
father.
Jeffers entered the University of Pittsburgh at fifteen. When
his father retired the next year, the family moved to Los
Angeles and Jeffers transferred to Occidental College, from
which he graduated in 1905 at the age of eighteen. The
precocious teenager did graduate work at several
universities, studying literature, medicine, and forestry
before realizing poetry was his calling.
now included twin sons Donnan and Garth-on a promontory
overlooking the Pacific ocean.
In 1924 Jeffers published Tamar and Other Poems with a
small press in New York. It attracted no initial notice, but a
year later it was suddenly taken up by several influential
critics. Jeffers produced an expanded trade edition
containing what would be his most famous narrative poem,
"Roan Stallion." Both public and critical opinion were
extraordinary. Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925)
went into multiple reprintings. Critics compared him to
Sophocles and Shakespeare, but Jeffers ignored his sudden
celebrity and focused on his work. Over the next ten years
he wrote the most remarkable, ambitious, and odd series of
narrative poems in American literature, published in eight
major collections.
By World War II, Jeffers's critical reputation had collapsed
and would not rise again until after his death. In 1945,
however, the noted actress Judith Anderson asked the poet
to translate and adapt Euripides's classical tragedy Medea
for the modern stage. When Jeffers's Medea opened on
broadway in 1947, it stunned audiences and critics with its
power and intensity.
Medea's success relieved Jeffers's financial worries, but the
happiest days of his life were now behind him. After Una's
slow death from cancer in 1950, he withdrew further from
the world. Jeffers published only one book during the last
fourteen years of his life, Hungerfield and Other Poems
(1954). But even as his eyesight failed, he never stopped
writing. A few days after his seventy-fifth birthday, he died
in his sleep at Tor House.
At the University of Southern California, Jeffers met Una Call
Kuster, a beautiful woman who was not only two years older
than he, but married to a wealthy local attorney. Robinson
and Una fell irrevocably in love. After seven years of guiltridden romance with many renunciations, separations,
reconciliations, and eventually a public scandal, Una
obtained a divorce on August 1, 1913. The next day she and
Jeffers married. They traveled north to the wild Big Sur
region of coastal California and rented a small cabin in the
village of Carmel-by-the Sea, which they recognized as their
"inevitable place."
The twenty-seven-year-old poet knew that he had not yet
written anything of enduring value, despite the publication
of his first book, Flagons and Apples (1912). The death of
both Jeffers's father and his own newborn daughter in 1914
heightened his sense of mortality.
After issuing a second collection, Californians (1916), Jeffers
published nothing for eight years. He divided his time
between writing and building a house for his family—which
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Jeffers and California
Tor House and Hawk Tower
After their marriage in August 1913, Robinson and Una
Jeffers hoped to live in England for a while. Before they
could finalize their plans, however, World War I began in
Europe and they were forced to remain in America. Seeking
a coastal village where they could live a simple, quiet life,
they decided to visit Carmel, California.
Tor House derives its name from the rocky hill (called a “tor”
in Gaelic) upon which the house is built. One of the rock
outcroppings serves as a cornerstone and is celebrated in
the poem “To the Rock That Will be a Cornerstone of the
House.” Jeffers named Hawk Tower for the hawk that would
visit him daily while he worked.
Jeffers had traveled widely in Europe and America, but
Carmel and the Big Sur coast were different from any place
he had ever been. "For the first time in my life," he later
wrote of this first encounter, "I could see people living—
amid magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did
in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer's Ithaca. Here was life
purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after
cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls,
as they have done for thousands of years, and will for
thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life
that was also permanent life...."
Local contractor M. J. Murphy built the west wing of Tor
House (1918–1919); Jeffers’s son Donnan completed the
east wing in 1957. In the intervening years, after spending
mornings writing in the attic by the window looking outward
to the mountains, Jeffers labored afternoons to make the
other stone structures that compose the buildings
collectively known as Tor House: a stone wall and a
detached garage (1919–1920), the latter converted to a
kitchen in 1954; Hawk Tower (1920–1924); a dining room
(1926–1930); and the first floor of the east wing (begun in
1937).
During the next few years, Jeffers hiked the nearby
mountains, explored the seacoast, and listened to the stories
of people who lived there. He began to feel a profound
connection to the landscape. In 1919, when he and Una
built Tor House, his feeling of kinship with the land
deepened. By 1925, when he completed Hawk Tower,
Jeffers and Carmel were one.
Jeffers gathered the granite stones, which he called “the
primitive rock”—more than 80-million-year-old Santa Lucia
granite—from the shoreline below Tor House, “each stone
Baptized from that abysmal font” (“To the House”). He rolled
the stones up from the sea, some of them weighing close to
400 pounds. Working alone, Jeffers built the forty-foot high
Hawk Tower for Una. As his hands worked with stone, his
mind worked on the poetry he would write the next
morning.
"Jeffers Country" extends along the Monterey County
coastline from Point Pinos in the north to Lucia and beyond
in the south. This stretch of central California includes the
Santa Lucia mountains, the Ventana wilderness, and Los
Padres National Forest, as well as the rugged canyons and
steep cliffs of the incomparable Big Sur. Native Americans
inhabited the area for hundreds of years before father
Junípero Serra built a mission there in 1771 and before a
scattering of settlers arrived—a situation Jeffers alludes to in
such poems as "Hands."
By Jeffers's time, the city of Monterey was well established
and the small village of Carmel was growing, but the area
was mostly wild. "It is not possible to be quite sane here,"
Jeffers said of the dramatic landscape. Like the local
cypresses bent and twisted by the relentless ocean wind,
some of the area's people led tortured lives—especially
those who lived in remote canyons or in isolated cabins
within sight and sound of the sea.
In addition to the exceptional stonemasonry—the beautiful
Roman arch of the original garage, the flat arches of the
north-facing windows of the dining room, the hidden
passageway of Hawk Tower—the house and tower are
notable for the artifacts that Jeffers embedded in the walls.
These include pre-Colombian terra cotta heads from Mexico
and small tesserae from the baths of Caracalla in Rome. He
painted mottoes and verses on some walls, house beams,
and furniture. The house did have running water, but lacked
electricity or telephones. In and around the property, Jeffers
planted some two thousand trees.
Taken together, the poetry inspired by Tor House, the
stonemasonry, the artifacts, the mottoes, and verses make
the house and tower a living monument to one of America’s
greatest poets.
Like his contemporary John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers set
much of his work against a California backdrop. Through his
haunting lyrics and dramatic narrative poems, Jeffers
captures the energy and beauty of a landscape he called
"the noblest thing I have ever seen."
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Jeffers and American Culture
In a culture where many believe that "poetry makes nothing
happen," Jeffers remains strangely influential among both
artists and scientists.
Environmentalists and conservationists consider him an
influential figure in the movement to protect natural habitat,
wilderness, and coastal land. Guided by Ansel Adams, the
Sierra Club's lavish folio Not Man Apart: Photographs of the
Big Sur Coast combined lines from Jeffers's poetry with
photographs in a work that helped focus political efforts to
preserve that spectacular stretch of California coastline. Poet
Robert Hass calls Jeffers an "early environmentalist," as he
was "perhaps the first American poet to grasp the
devastating extent of the changes human technologies and
populations were wreaking on the rest of the earth's
biological life."
Jeffers thoroughly understood and embraced the scientific
worldview of his time. Indeed, the physicist freeman Dyson,
writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995, compares
Jeffers to Einstein and says, "He expressed better than any
other poet the scientist's vision." Astronomers and geologists
remain interested in his work.
Jeffers's poetry inspired two original and seminal Californian
photographers: Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
Throughout his life, Ansel Adams was particularly inspired by
Jeffers: "I am going to do my best to call attention to the
simplicities of environment and method; to 'the enormous
beauty of the world,' as Jeffers writes." Morley Baer, another
important California photographer, read Jeffers's poems as a
college student and many years later claimed, "Jeffers
helped me see and sense the coast of California as a place
of great tensions, great natural tensions that are part of life
and not to be subdued and eradicated."
Many musicians have been inspired by Jeffers's poetry—from
jazz musician Walter Tolleson to UCLA geophysics professor
Peter Bird. Composer Alva Henderson's first opera, Medea—
after Jeffers's adaptation—was originally performed by the
San Diego Opera. Even the California-born Beach Boys were
inspired to write a song after Jeffers's poem "The Beaks of
Eagles," which originally appeared on their 1973 album
Holland.
Jeffers's great triumph is that now—more than seventy-five
years after his radical poetic voice first sounded—his poetry
retains its power to inspire and disturb.
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Historical and Literary Context
The Life and Times
of Robinson Jeffers
1880s
 1925: Jeffers’s acclaimed collection, Roan Stallion,
Tamar and Other Poems, is published.
 1927: Charles Lindbergh makes history by flying solo
across the Atlantic Ocean.
1930s
 1887: John Robinson Jeffers is born near Pittsburgh.
 Jeffers publishes several collections of poetry.
 Publicity from the Southern Pacific railroad company
promises unique natural beauty and economic
prosperity in California.
 1932: Due to the Great Depression, unemployment in
California hits 28 percent.
1890s
 1893: Unprecedented drop in U.S. gold supply causes
a three-year nationwide depression.
 1894: Naturalist and conservationist John Muir
publishes The Mountains of California as part of his
ongoing effort to preserve the sublime Californian
landscape from the ravages of industry.
 1898: Beginning of the Spanish-American War.
1900s
 1901: Theodore Roosevelt takes office as U.S.
President.
 1903: Jack London’s The Call of the Wild published.
 1905: Jeffers graduates from Occidental College.
 1906: An earthquake registering 8.3 on the Richter
scale wreaks havoc across the San Francisco Bay
area.
 1933: John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown is
published, a novel influenced by Jeffers.
 1939: Germany invades Poland, beginning World War
II in Europe.
1940s
 1941: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brings the
U.S. into World War II.
 1945: The war ends after claiming upwards of fifty
million lives worldwide.
 1947: Jeffers’s translation of Euripides’s Medea opens
on Broadway to critical acclaim.
 1948: George Orwell’s 1984 published.
1950s

1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy brandishes a list of
alleged communists in the State Department,
heralding the dawn of the Cold War.

1952: Ansel Adams and other artists found Aperture
magazine, dedicated to the art and technique of
photography.

1954: Hungerfield and Other Poems published.
1910s
 Jeffers’s first book, Flagons and Apples, is published in
1912; Jeffers marries Una Call Kuster in 1913.
 World War I erupts in Europe in 1914; America enters
in 1917.
 1918: Armistice signed November 11, ending World
War I. The Treaty of Versailles is signed the following
year by President Woodrow Wilson.
1920s
1960s

1961: John F. Kennedy takes office as U.S.
President; construction of the Berlin Wall begins.

1962: Jeffers dies at Tor House on January 20.

1963: The Beginning and the End and Other Poems
is published posthumously as Jeffers’s final work.
 Southern California experiences an oil boom and a
population surge, leaving Los Angeles the most
motorized city in the USA.
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Other Works/Adaptations
Jeffers’s Poetry
Lyric Poetry
During Jeffers’s life, the controversies about his narrative
poems unfortunately overshadowed the shorter works
tucked into the back pages of each new book. These lyric
meditations—often autobiographical and generally written in
long, rhythmic free-verse lines—marked a new kind of
nature poem that tried to understand the physical world not
from a human perspective but on its own terms. He rejected
rhyme and traditional meter, which inhibited him from telling
a story flexibly in verse. Disclaiming the example of Walt
Whitman, Jeffers preferred—as scholar Albert Gelpi
explains—“to see the long verses of the Hebrew prophets
and psalmists in the King James translation or the
hexameters of Homer and Aeschylus as more kindred
analogues and sources.”
To say that Jeffers’s chief imaginative gifts were scope,
simplicity, narrative poise, and moral seriousness makes him
seem closer to a distinguished jurist than a great poet. But
there was something of the judge about Jeffers, particularly
the Old Testament variety. In such poems as “Shine,
Perishing Republic,” Jeffers warns corrupt humanity against
the evils of war and violence. His belief that mankind is not
the center of the universe is expressed in poems like
“Credo”: “The beauty of things was born before eyes and
sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain
when there is no heart to break for it.” When he is gone, he
prays—in the poem “Granddaughter”—that his beloved little
Una “will find / Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to
cover her.”
Although Jeffers knew that he and his sons would die and
that the world as they knew it would change, he predicted
that “this rock will be here, grave, earnest, / not passive” in
his poem “Oh Lovely Rock.” As Jeffers believed, man might
be “nature dreaming,” but through hawks, stones, and the
ocean, “The Beauty of Things” will endure: “to feel / Greatly,
and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural /
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.”
literature. Originally published in fourteen major collections,
these books add up to more than fifteen thousand pages of
verse.
Jeffers’s epic-length poems such as Tamar, The Women at
Point Sur, Cawdor, Thurso’s Landing, and The Loving
Shepherdess told the mostly tragic stories of men and
women who lived on the big sur coast of California. His
verse dramas such as The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Dear
Judas, At the Beginning of an Age, Medea, and The Cretan
Woman turned to ancient Greece, the Bible, and medieval
Europe for inspiration. In both instances, Jeffers used
traditional genres, subjects, and themes to interrogate the
Western tradition as a whole and to illuminate modern life.
His concern with the latter compelled him to look closely at
American culture and the surrounding world. He was usually
repelled by what he saw. Identifying “cruelty and filth and
superstition” as the three banes of humankind, Jeffers
lashed out at the horrific violence of the two World Wars, at
the pollution destroying wildlife and ruining natural
environments, and at the political and religious fanaticism
darkening the minds of millions.
Almost immediately Jeffers’s long narrative poems divided
audiences. Violent, sexual, philosophical, and subversive,
these verse novels are alternately magnificent and
hyperbolic, powerful and excessive, dramatic and overblown,
and unlike anything else in modernist American poetry.
The Plays of Robinson Jeffers

The Cretan Woman. First produced in 1954.

The Tower Beyond Tragedy. First produced in
November 1950.

Medea. New York: Random House, 1946. Reprinted
with "Cawdor." New York: New Directions, 1970.
First produced in October 1947.
Narrative Poetry
While Jeffers devoted considerable attention to the lyric form
throughout his career, his decision to write narrative poetry
led him to the epic tradition and verse drama. From 1925 to
1954, Jeffers wrote the most stunning, ambitious, and
stylistically diverse series of narrative poems in American
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Discussion Questions
1.
Robinson Jeffers studied literature, philosophy,
medicine, and forestry in graduate school. How do
these four areas of study inform the subject matter
and style of Jeffers’s poetry?
2.
Jeffers and his wife, Una, discovered the coast of
Carmel to be their “inevitable place.” How does this
landscape inform his poetry? Where is your
“inevitable place”?
3.
What parallels can you imagine between the
building of a stone house and the writing of a
poem? Can you find examples of this parallel in
Jeffers’s poetry?
4.
Many mammals and birds—especially the red-tailed
hawk and the falcon—appear in Jeffers’s poetry.
While his allusions to animals are certainly literal,
what symbolic possibilities exist in poems such as
“Rock and Hawk” or “Hurt Hawks”?
5.
In his poem “Carmel Point,” Jeffers declares that
“people are a tide / That swells and in time will ebb,
and all / Their works dissolve.” How poignant is the
parallel Jeffers makes between the human race and
the tide?
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Additional Resources
Published Resources
There are four paperback anthologies containing selected
poetry of Robinson Jeffers, two published by Stanford
University Press. The Wild God of the World: An Anthology
of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Albert Gelpi, also contains the
long poem “Cawdor” (2003). Tim Hunt edited a longer
anthology, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, in 2001.
The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, also edited by
Hunt, is a five-volume collection published between 1988
and 2001.
All poetry cited in this Reader's Guide is available on the
Poetry Foundation's website at www.poetryfoundation.org.
Selected Books about Jeffers and
His Poetry

Greenan, Edith. Of Una Jeffers: A Memoir. Ed.
James Karman. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press,
1998.

Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California.
Rev. ed. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2001.

Karman, James, ed. Stones of the Sur: Poetry by
Robinson Jeffers, Photographs by Morley Baer.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Zaller, Robert, ed. Centennial Essays for Robinson
Jeffers. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press,
1991.
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Credits
Works Cited
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and
American Culture. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1991.
Gioia, Dana, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks, eds. California
Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley, CA:
Heyday Books, 2004.
Gioia, Dana, David Mason, Meg Schoerke, eds. TwentiethCentury American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. New
York: McGraw Hill, 2004.
Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
Edited by Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1988-2001.
The National Endowment for the Arts was established by
Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal
government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $5
billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and
innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities.
The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state
arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the
philanthropic sector.
---. The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson
Jeffers. Edited by Albert Gelpi. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003.
Jeffers, Robinson, James Karman, and Una Jeffers. The
Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters
of Una Jeffers. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009.
Robinson Jeffers, "Carmel Point" and excerpts from "Tor
House," "For Una," "De Rerum Virtute" and "The Beauty of
Things," from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
Copyright 1935 and © 1963 by Donnan Jeffers and Garth
Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
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Acknowledgments
Writers: Dana Gioia and Erika Koss for the National
Endowment for the Arts. "Tor House and Hawk Tower" by
Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts; "Jeffers and California" by James
Karman.
The creation of Robinson Jeffers educational materials has
been made possible, in part, with support from the Poetry
Foundation.
The Big Read Reader’s Guides are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
© Arts Midwest
Cover image: Derivative of "Red-tailed Hawk in flight" by
Alan Vernon CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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